Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible)

by Willie James Jennings

There is only one central character in this story of Acts. It is God, the Holy Spirit.

The author of Luke–Acts is not against such nobility, but he is caught up in a different optic. He wants his readers to see a past unfolding in a future and making intelligible a present. In this regard, his history is now.

This irrevocability in Acts sometimes gets confused with immutability so that Acts gets interpreted as the historical foundation of the church’s life, as if Acts reveals the marble, stone, brick and mortar of ecclesial existence. Acts as architecture, in this sense, creates monument thinking about this narrative. Monument thinking turns the book of Acts into an ecclesial museum, the purpose of which is to show us the earlier forms of church life, religious ritual, or theology.

The book of Acts beckons us to a life-giving historical consciousness that senses being in the midst of time that is both past and present and that pulls us toward a future with God in the new creation. That future with God, however, does not discount the now, the present moment.

In Acts we find faith caught between diaspora and empire. Faith is always caught between diaspora and empire. It is always caught between those on the one side focused on survival and fixated on securing a future for their people and on the other side those intoxicated with the power and possibilities of empire and of building a world ordered by its financial, social, and political logics that claim to be the best possible way to bring stability and lasting peace.

We must hear in the Acts story the pathos of life caught in the grip of diaspora and empire—of people angry, confused, and frustrated as the resurrected Jesus calls them to envision the new creature in the Spirit, which is a mind-altering new life together. Fundamental to that new reality is the joining of Jew and Gentile.

The Gentiles of Acts are on their way to communion with Jews while remaining Gentiles. This is the most terrifying aspect of interruption: love.

The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. Indeed the Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God. Clearly,

But now God invites touch, announcing a new order of things, a new possibility of knowledge and even truth discovered through hands touching a sanctified body. Handling Jesus, as the disciples will soon come to understand, will happen as they put their hands on those whom he chooses to embrace. Jesus took bread and wine into his hands just as he took the disciples into his life.

Geography matters. Place matters to God.

Nationalist desire easily creates a fantasy of resurrection and the fantasy of resurrection appeals to peoples, calling forth a triumphal vision of a nation that rises from death and is filled with conquerors and the powerful.

Witness here carries two fundamental connotations for these disciples. They carry the real history of life with Jesus. They are now in the position of the master storytellers.

They will be an irrefutable presence. They will also be witnesses of divine presence. They will give room to the witness, making their lives a stage on which the resurrected Jesus will appear and claim each creature as his own, as a site of love and desire. This second sense of witness reaches into the first sense.

Yet as Jan Milič Lochman noted, Jesus’ “journey to heaven” becomes the disciples’ “journey to the ends of the earth.”

Watching Jesus and watching for Jesus was and is a significant temptation for his disciples. Such watching can easily undermine movement and easily undermine the priority of the journey.

Nationalist vision is weakness and fear masquerading as strength and courage, because it beckons the world’s peoples to postures of protectionism and leans toward xenophobia.

Should disciples of Jesus love their nation, the one they claim and are claimed by? This is the wrong question. The question we are compelled to ask and answer by our lives is, How might we show the love of God for all peoples, a love that cannot be contained by any nation, a love that slices through borders and boundaries and reaches into every people group, every clan, every tribe, and every family?

Nationalism remains a powerful way of imagining life together because it is a theological vision that mimics the desire of God for our full communion with each other. It is communion without God or God simply used as a slogan.

John Calvin was right to see the implications of this text for the awesome task of congregations choosing ministers.

this is not what the disciples imagined or hoped would manifest the power of the Holy Spirit.

To learn a language requires submission to a people. Even

The ancient challenge is a God who is way ahead of us and is calling us to catch up. The modern problem is born of the colonial enterprise where language play and use entered its most demonic displays.

The only real question is, Do we hear what the tongues mean? For

Of course, one voice speaks in the preaching, yet at every moment, at any given moment when a preacher speaks, many preachers past and present are speaking. The preacher is always a company of preachers.

would suggest that they have correctly captured the newness, but where they envisage restriction and limitation, it would be more helpful to see expansion and openness. The trajectory of the text is not toward formula but formation. From this moment forward, life with God will be through Jesus, and this moment of baptism will yield life in a body turned toward the renewal of creation.

In the moment we think something is ours, or our people’s, that same God will demand we sell it, give it away, or offer more of it in order to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, or shelter the homeless, using it to create the bonds of shared life.

The holy words that bring consequences are words tied to the concrete liberating actions of God for broken people. Such holy words bring the speakers into direct confrontation with those in power.

Indeed there is no such thing as individual boldness for the followers of Jesus. Of course each disciple can and must be bold, but their boldness is always a together boldness, a joined boldness, a boldness born of intimacy. The modern lie of individualism is most powerful when we imagine that boldness comes from within. It does not. It comes from without, from the Spirit of God. The disciples gathered together to ask for what comes from without:

Christians often turn marriage from an act of worship into an object of worship and turn the couple from a shared journey of disciples into the end and goal of discipleship.

The question we must ask is whether singleness as a state of being makes any theological sense. It does not. All disciples of Jesus are caught up in a life of unfolding intimacy with the triune God and with each other.

Yet we must end the burden placed on couples to be the container of all intimate life, and the heresy that the couple is the only safe and sanctioned place where the honesty, safety, and joy of being vulnerable creatures may be touched and celebrated. That heresy has allowed the couple to bend the life of the church toward itself, enfolding ecclesial existence in its wishes and dreams and defining the quality of life by its own lights.

A couple can be a space of safety and freedom only as it participates in a space of safety and freedom for a gathering community. Only in a space of shared intimate life may a couple be spared from its own idolatry and its use as a destructive power.

Safety is not the inheritance of Jesus’ disciples, only witness.

Gamaliel is the quintessential compromised intellectual who reads history from the wrong side and politics from the sidelines. The frightful reality at the heart of his words is that they reflect a properly formed and supremely trained scholar who, like so many others, cannot see

the day of divine visitation because it has come in unimpressive flesh.

Diaspora people are always on edge, because they know the stakes. They understand that life together as a people is not a given. It must be won again and again against those alien forces that would undermine it, drain it of life, and leave it sickly and dying.

God, the Holy Spirit, fills Stephen and will face death with him. This will always be the case for believers. No matter how hard they are thrown, the stones cannot separate Stephen from God.

The gospel draws such people who have not yet entered fully the space of redemption. They live in the space just outside redeemed space where their energy and time are caught up in chasing the crowd’s attention and seeking power.

A disciple of Jesus is someone who not only enters the story of another people, Israel, but also someone ready to enter the stories of those to whom she is sent by God.

Prayer and hunger, hunger and prayer—these will be the pillars on which God will build the future of the creature. These are the pillars on which God will constitute the new order. Hunger and prayer go together, completing each other in God. God wills the creature to pray, and God wills the creature to hunger.

Both Peter and these sent from Cornelius are guests in the house of the unclean, and together they are inside the story of God. Together they sojourn into the depths of divine longing. Peter will now enter more fully into the richness of being a witness found in the sharing of space, food, and drink.

Divine touch is always unexpected and usually unconventional.

Through Israel God announces desire for the creature and embodies that desire through concrete relationships. We might call this an inverted exceptionalism. Unlike American or other forms of nationalistic exceptionalism, this form of exceptionalism turns people outward not inward. God

He must suture together a known faithfulness with an unknown faithfulness and bring together obedience to ancient Word and Spirit with obedience to Spirit and present Word. Indeed nothing has changed, but everything has changed.

God spoke to Peter, and now through Peter God is speaking to the saints gathered there to hear. The power of God is present in weakness, in the voice of one disciple of Jesus who simply tells the truth of what has happened to him and what God did through him.

the struggle of the church has been twofold: we struggle to hear the new word that God is constantly speaking, and we struggle to see the link between the new word and the word previously spoken.

The point is the present moment with the living God who is with us, beckoning us to communion. The God who speaks to us now calls us into the risk of hearing a new word, a word that orients us toward the unanticipated and the unprecedented where the reconciling God is active.

Christians, like no one else, should understand how easy it is to return to prison, not because of human failing but because of failed systems that are calibrated against the powerless, the weak, and the poor and work best against insurgent voices pressing for systemic change.

The church often fails to find the amazement, the joy, and the

celebration for and with those who have been set free.